Danny Yung

Interweaving Performance Cultures

Fellow 2015/16

An experimental art pioneer and one of the most influential artists in Hong Kong, Danny Yung is a founding member and co-artistic director of Zuni Icosahedron, a highly esteemed experimental theater in Hong Kong. Over the past 40 years, after having graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in architecture and from Columbia University in urban design, Yung has been deeply involved in diverse artistic fields, including theatre, cartoon, film, video, and visual and installation art.

Yung is the recipient of the following prizes and awards: the Hong Kong Arts Development Award 2015 for Artist of the Year (Drama); The Fukuoka Prize – Arts and Culture Prize (2014); The Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in recognition of Yung’s contributions towards the arts and the cultural exchange between Germany and Hong Kong (2009); The Music Theatre NOW Award presented by the UNESCO’s International Theatre Institute for his theater work “Tears of Barren Hill”.

Research Project

As an artist and a theater director, I have been approaching stage creations as critiques/critiquing, which has meant that my stage works are often considered as forms of dramaturgy in their own right. In addition, as the recipient of various medals and prizes for my contributions in cultural exchanges, I also see “cultural exchanges” as my approach to stage creations, which has inspired me to learn/research more about what constitutes the essence of cultural exchanges. Over the past two decades, I have been working closely with traditional theater artists from China (trained in xiqu, i.e. Chinese opera) as well as with artists from different parts of Asia in order to explore ways to preserve and develop these traditional (dying) art forms in our contemporary context. One of my decade-long, ongoing theater works of this nature, “Flee by Night”, will be presented at the theater of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin on 5 & 6 November 2016. During my residency, I would like to revisit and reflect on my explorations related to the trans-cultural experimentation of my art throughout the last forty years, which span theater and the visual arts. I would also like to organize my writings and correspondences on related subjects.